This week, senior leaders from Flinders University’sNew Venture Institute (NVI), the University’s center of innovation and entrepreneurship, are visiting Temple’s Fox School of Business (Fox) to collaborate with faculty and solidify the initial round of courses that will launch this February as part of a three-year partnership between Fox and Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia to deliver customized entrepreneurship and innovation education to thousands of Flinders students.

Through the partnership with Flinders, Fox faculty members are developing a series of 12 online education modules related to entrepreneurship and will provide training to Flinders faculty to deliver the course materials. The content will be available to all Flinders students, regardless of major or course of study, and will include videos, exercises and training manuals.

“This is a critical visit,” said Marilyn Anthony, Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at Fox and Director of the Flinders project. “Our key content developers, including Fox faculty and adjunct professors, are meeting individually with the Flinders team to develop the conceptual design of each course (called a “topic” in Australia), including instructional flow and course materials. They want to ensure that the content aligns with Flinders students and local issues relevant in Southern Australia.”

As part of Fox-Flinders partnership, Fox will also provide RoadMap™, its proprietary higher-education platform that assembles all feedback and assessments to demonstrate personal development and return on investment to students. It will be customized, however, to track the development of competencies, or personal behaviors, that have been identified as valuable based on focus groups, surveys, and feedback from business professionals and industry leaders in Adelaide.

“The model takes advantage of Fox’s expertise and adapting that to knowledgeable insiders to make it a better fit for South Australia,” Anthony said.

“One of the major benefits of RoadMap™ from an administrative perspective is the ability to analyze and access and analyze cross-course data and use it in a variety of ways that one can’t natively in a learning management system such as Moodle or BlackBoard,” said Cliff Tironi, co-creator of RoadMap™ and Manager of Performance Analytics for Fox’s MBA and MS Programs.

As part of the visit, Matt Salier, Director of NVI, delivered a presentation to Fox faculty and administration on “the value of the Flinders NVI Model – The Entrepreneurial University.”

“We can’t do things as universities have always done things,” Salier said. He emphasized the need to challenge the way things have been done in the past, learn from past mistakes, and encourage students, regardless of major, to “Differently Think,” the advertising slogan running in Australia to promote the Flinders-Fox partnership. “We want our graduates to be the most innovative employees for our SME (small and medium enterprise) economy. We have to find a way to run alongside contemporary issues and stay current.”

The Fox MC-Flinders partnership builds on the success of both organizations’ efforts to support entrepreneurship. Fox’s expertise in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education has been widely recognized: The Online MBA program at the Fox School of Business is ranked no. 1 in the nation for the second consecutive year by US News & World Report, both the graduate and undergraduate Entrepreneurship programs at Fox are ranked among the top 10 by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine, and Fox MC has provided consulting services to nearly 150 startups and early stage companies.